


illuminate all of my doubt

by Cinnamonbookworm



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Alternative Universe - No Island, F/M, Kissing, New Year's Eve, a bet is made, confronting your own peter-pan-ness, i'll leave it up to you guys whether or not oliver is the arrow in this 'verse, oliver and felicity are little shits, who don't know how to get their shit together
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-03
Updated: 2016-01-03
Packaged: 2018-05-11 09:30:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,837
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5622208
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cinnamonbookworm/pseuds/Cinnamonbookworm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's two in the morning and Felicity has a lot of regrets. The main one being actually taking Tommy's advice when he'd told her to "Live a little."</p>
<p>A little new years olicity. And a whole lot of wanting to bash their heads together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	illuminate all of my doubt

**Author's Note:**

> so this was... fun to write  
> i think this is the first real fully-olicity thing i've written since oracle so like... wow  
> it was fun. also, big thanks to honorthedeadbyfighting and sweetoctopodes for helping me through this, because idk what i'd do without those lovely ladies.  
> i'm not guarenteeing a sequel.

Felicity realizes only at about two that morning that this dress was a bad idea.

She should’ve known it earlier, of course, because sequins and sleeveless is pretty much _asking_ for something equivalent to rug-burn on the soft insides of your arms. But she’d liked the ‘60s feel of it, and blue sequins are _such_ a New Year's Eve look and she’d kind of just wanted to have fun.

That was the goal, right? To have fun.

To find who post-Cooper Felicity Smoak was. To find out whether or not the blondes-have-more-fun moniker was really as true as she’d been told it was. To live a little.

_“Come on, Felicity,” Tommy had teased her earlier that night, sliding a shot in front of her. “Live a little.”_

Felicity shakes her head, wondering why it feels like there’s marbles whirling around in there. To be honest, the movie night Barry and Iris had done last night actually sounds preferable now that the sun is rising and her head is hurting. If she could time travel she totally would’ve chosen that instead - whether or not they’d finally gotten their shit together enough for it to be a date or not.

Because last night… last night was a mess.

It’s the kind of mess that isn’t going to fade away with time like the irritation on the insides of her arms and the pain in her head is. If it was, Felicity would probably use that time machine from her earlier hypothetical again because time machines are handy and either use would mean she wouldn't have to _deal_ with everything that just happened.

She hits her head against the glass window of the car she’s in. Her Lyft driver looks over like she’s worried Felicity may make a break for it any second. That possibility also doesn’t sound too bad - a life on the run probably won’t be nearly as bad as that dinner she’s supposed to go to tonight.

She’d called Lyft instead of Uber like a sane person. Because she had been drunk but she hadn’t been _stupid._

Also, she’s way too wired into social media to miss the meme-like frenzy that was happening over Uber drivers’ charges.

So now she sits. And watches the lights of Starling City pass by. And really really wishes her Lyft driver could just crash into the TARDIS or something. That would be great. Then she wouldn’t have to deal with this stuff.

_Stuff_ mostly meaning _Oliver Queen_. Who, until tonight, Felicity had mostly regarded as Laurel’s high school ex who also happened to be best friends with Tommy. She’d gone out knowing he’d probably try and pull some New Year’s Eve kiss stunt with one of the girls in their party. He was like that. Lots of flowers and chocolate and promises he didn’t intend to keep.

Luckily enough for Felicity, she’d gotten to have front-row seats to most of those wonderful ladies realizing he did _not_ intend to keep those promises.

Laurel used to try and warn them but… when you’re an ex of a guy who’s graced the tabloids ten too many times, most girls just brush it off as petty celebrity jealousy. And then they blame you when things don’t work out.

They still duck in stores when a red-head with hair the same color as Carrie Cutter’s shows up to examine purple stilettos. Hiding also happens sometimes when they’re at the shooting range together (well, Laurel’s actually the one shooting, sometimes Iris and Lyla too; Felicity’s the one in the corner on her phone because last time she touched a gun it was her father’s and she’s really not in the mood to spiral in that direction most weekdays that they’re in there) and Miss Bertinelli shows up.

She doesn’t even want to _think about_ that one time they ran into Isabel Rochev.

The bottom line is: she’d seen the trail of broken hearts; she should’ve known better.

 

_She loves Laurel, she really does, but when her and Tommy go out to the dance floor, Felicity finds it hard to follow. She really really doesn’t want to dance alone._

_The only other option, however is the same guy who she once saw do sixteen shots of watermelon-flavored vodka (she didn’t even know that was a thing) and then set his own tongue on fire in an attempt to impress someone he’d known for about two minutes. (Tommy told her one time that he sort of became like that in an effort to make up for all the attention he never got growing up. They all did, really. When Felicity found the three of them they’d been broken enough to fall apart. Just like her. So really, she shouldn’t be judging.)_

_Still, when he comes up to her later, when she’s sitting at the bar, six minutes to midnight, watching Tommy and Laurel be ridiculous and cute and decidedly not-drunk together - Tommy had given up drinking for the night for Laurel’s sake, being decidedly drunk herself and he comes up to her with a glass of water, she thinks maybe she won’t tell him to go away in the same manner she’s been telling all the other guys who’ve come up to her that night._

_Sara would probably be ashamed of her - she’d always said hooking up with strangers was a bucket-list item. Then again, Sara probably would’ve flipped these guys off as well._

_Felicity drinks the water._

_Oliver tries to drink his glass but kind of misses his mouth and it spills all over his shirt._

_Felicity makes the mistake of trying to clean it up. All she ends up doing is digging herself into a hole involving many statements about the relative_ hardness _of his chest and then proceeding to bury herself in said hole when he asks her about Cooper._

_Normally, she doesn’t talk to guys she’s just felt up in bars about her exes, but she supposes she’s not really trying to start anything with Oliver Queen tonight anyways, so she tells him about the breakup; how he’d locked her outside their apartment for almost a full day, and then when she’d finally given up at hoping he wasn’t really trying to leave her, she’d pried it open with her credit card, gotten her clothes and her laptops, and asked Laurel to stay with her._

_When she’d gone back to the apartment to get the rest of her things, he’d left without a trace._

_Just like her dad._

_She sure knew how to pick them, didn’t she?_

_“It’s a good thing you’re such an obvious bad idea, though.” she tells Oliver, “because I’m never going to have to worry about going out with you.”_

_“Really?” he asks, and yep, there it is, the smirk that sets people on fire occasionally._

_“Uh huh; because my type is, contrary to popular belief,_ not _just the species of guys that are bad ideas, but the very rare sub-species of that, which is guys-who-are-bad-ideas-but-look-like-amazing-ideas.”_

_“So you’re saying I don’t look like an amazing idea?”_

_“You_ do _look like an amazing idea; but only if you’re talking about the kind of amazing idea that only seems amazing when you’re as drunk as I am right now. No, I mean the kind of I-can-picture-our-marriage amazing idea.”_

_“Well you got me there,” Oliver jokes. “I can’t picture our marriage.”_

_“Why not?” Felicity doesn’t know exactly what part of him it is that sets her on edge like this, that makes it feel like she’s in some sort of platform game where the ground falls out from under her as soon as she lands so she has to keep moving and jumping just to make sure she doesn’t start falling._

_“Because I guarantee you’d be sober at our wedding and I don’t think I’ve talked to you enough sober to picture that correctly.”_

_“New Year’s resolution, then: talk to Oliver Queen without alcohol in me. Easier than last year’s…”_

_“What was last year’s?”_

_She shrugs and then spins her glass around with her finger a little bit, like she’s trying to turn it into a top. “Manage to end the year without someone leaving me again.”_

_Oliver gets really silent after that._

_So far mission keep-Felicity-Smoak-from-becoming-one-of-those-women-she-hides-from-in-stores is working out pretty brilliantly. Nothing more romantic than telling a guy terrified of commitment that your entire life has been just waiting for someone to love you enough to really commit._

 

She should’ve just kept going. She should’ve brought up that guy who ditched her at Senior Prom. Or that time Ray Palmer stood her up for brunch. She should’ve laid out all the ways she’s a little fucked up inside on the table in front of him.

That would’ve been a surefire way to prevent what happened.

The car stops in front of the apartment - all hers now that Cooper left. All-too-reminiscent of her childhood home. She’s probably going to sell it. She doesn't like living with ghosts.

Felicity ignores her phone buzzing for the upteenth time. She’s so not in the mood for talking about this right now. If he’d wanted to _talk_ to her he should’ve done that instead of…

So he obviously doesn’t want to _talk_.

Which means it’s perfectly fine for her not want to talk to him, right? She doesn’t owe him anything. It had been - it was just fun. Just what Tommy told her to have. In fact, she bets Tommy probably set the whole thing up.

So it’s not her fault. It’s not her fault.

And he’s just going to leave anyway so really when she shuts off her phone it’s a preemptive measure. When she hangs the dress in the back of her closet and pretty much swears to never wear it again it’s all completely logical. When she finds the stupid Vegas shot glass she’d gotten Cooper for their six month anniversary - the glass he’d apparently decided he didn’t care enough about to take with him - and she throws it at the wall, she can excuse it as therapeutic.

Because she’s ridiculously stupid. An idiot, really. She’s being cheated worse than the people paying $200 for a ride home tonight, because Oliver Queen has “ _I’m going to leave you_ ” tattooed on his chest and she knows that’s basically the worst possible thing she could do to herself.

Yet she’d done it anyway.

Probably - definitely - out of some terrible sort of self-hatred. Like, if someone had thrown her a list of Top Ten Ways To Punish Yourself After A Breakup, Oliver Queen would’ve been the number one thing on that list.

Okay, so maybe Tommy didn’t set this up.

Maybe he’d kissed her because he’d wanted to.

Or maybe she’d just been there and he’d wanted to kiss someone who was willing.

But, in that case, he’d been more drunk than she’d thought he was because unsuspecting prey is _always_ more willing than she is, and he shouldn’t have tried to sober her up with water, either.

Because _obviously_ she wouldn’t have done that if she was completely sober.

Right?

Except no, she probably still would’ve because she got together with _Cooper_ when she was sober, so she’s fully capable of making absolutely terrible, life-ruining decisions when she’s sober. At least with this one she gets to blame it on the alcohol and move on.

But obviously she can’t do that, can she? Because her phone wouldn’t stop buzzing the whole ride home and Laurel and Tommy have that brunch tomorrow and he’s _bound_ to be there so that’s amazing.

Amazing. All of this is just amazing.

 

_All the music on the dance floor stops when there’s one minute left to midnight._

_That’s enough of a celebration for Felicity - she doesn’t really need anything else. She’s already made far too many innuendos than the average person is comfortable with, and also she’s pretty sure she’s was blinding him a bit when that spotlight thing was going on with her sequins._

_“Who you kissing at midnight?” she asks him, mostly as a joke, partially to see which girl she’s going to have to avoid in PetSmart next._

_He actually seems like he’s considering that for a moment, and she tries to punch him in the arm but actually just ends up damaging her fingers with his biceps. “I didn’t ask that so I could be involved in your prey-picking-process.”_

_Someone yells TEN from somewhere across the room._

_“You know, you say that, but most people actually_ enjoy _kissing me, you know.”_

_“Yes, I know, I know, didn’t Glamour write a whole article on that or something?”_

_NINE._

_“You still seem unsure.”_

_“Well, I just don’t see how great of a kisser you could be if I have to hide every time I see Isabel Rochev at a Palmer Tech board meeting.”_

_EIGHT._

_“Really?”_

_“Really.”_

_SEVEN._

_“I didn’t realize she still had that grudge on you.”_

_“Oh, so it’s_ me _she has the grudge on? I thought she just hated you and Laurel and therefore hated me by association.”_

_SIX._

_“Nope. Definitely you she hates.”_

_“Can I ask the reason why?”_

_“I think it was that brunch we all went to together. Something about short skirts.”_

_FIVE._

_“Isabel Rochev can rot in hell. I’ll have you know my skirts are exactly as short as I want them to be.”_

_Oliver coughs a little bit. “I wouldn’t know.”_

_“You don’t know whether or not my skirts are short or whether or not you’re actually decent at kissing?”_

_“Are we still on that?”_

_FOUR._

_“Maybe. Yes.”_

_“You’re a scientist, right, Felicity?”_

_THREE._

_“That’s a loose term for it I-”_

_“So you need proof, right?”_

_“Usually yes-”_

_TWO._

_Technically, he kisses her on two, but Felicity’s not all-too concerned with numbers because she’s pretty sure she’s actually on fire right now._

_And she barely has time to kiss him back before he pushes her forward so she's pressed against the back of the bar stool and yep that’s the tongue thing Laurel was talking about._

_That’s the signature move. The Mr. Queen Will See You Now. The- okay, this is a lot messier than she’d thought it was going to be._

_Which, of course it is, neither of them are exactly sober right now and he’s good but he’s got to have a flaw somewhere._

_She thinks, for all his many faults, she can at least forgive him for this. The tongue thing was definitely worth it (she takes it all back now - he’s a fantastic kisser) but there is one side effect. She supposes most of the time it doesn’t actually matter because other things are usually happening after he does said tongue thing. Other things that are definitely not her turning away as fast as she possibly can and hightailing it out of the bar with a very quick. “This was a bad idea.”_

_The only problem is he left a whole lot of spit in her mouth._

_She’s pretty pissed at him for that._

_How dare he kiss her like they’re about to die and this is a last confession and then leave his disgusting vodka-flavored spit in her mouth like the cocky asshole he is. Now she can’t possibly forget about this. Nope, because he just had to go and do that._

_Which is how Felicity finds herself two blocks away at a diner with an 80’s space theme, kind of hoping all the fatty food she’s eating will counteract the side effects of drinking._

_And by side effects she means the memory of Oliver Queen kissing her. Because right now she doesn’t think she’s forgetting that anytime soon._

 

Felicity wakes up around 9 the next day with approximately 97 texts.

She wants to die.

Half of them are from Laurel. A third of them are from Oliver Queen himself, the arrogant bastard, who seems to think he has something to apologize for. Well he does - he needs to apologize for sticking his tongue down her throat and basically writing his name on the roof of her mouth or whatever it was he did to make it so she can’t stop thinking about him.

Iris has decided to contribute as well to this text-swarm, despite the fact that she wasn’t even there (she also wasn’t hooking up with Barry. Felicity is a different kind of pissed about that).

Laurel’s concerns are not for Felicity’s own mental state, as they should be. Instead they’re about whether or not she got home safe that night. And then there’s the text Felicity never would’ve expected from Laurel. The one where she tells her to hear him out, because she of all people knows just how much people can change.

That’s something Felicity hates about Laurel. She’s so good at logic. She’s so fantastically great at making impossible situations seem all-too-logical and making terrible terrifying decisions seem like necessities for change and progress in the world.

So, Felicity thinks of her New Year’s resolution: to talk to him when she’s sober. But not now. She can’t handle it right now. She can do it later.

At the brunch.

And if she doesn’t… well, New Year’s resolutions are made to be broken.

 

So Laurel and Tommy are moving in together. That’s fun.

They’re also buying a house. An actual house. Something in the suburbs with a white picket fence and probably a neighborhood association.

In Felicity’s personal opinion, that sounds like actual hell.

But they’re both slightly ecstatic about the whole affair, so Felicity smiles for them and then picks at her omelette and tries very hard not to look across the table to where Oliver is sitting. She also tries very hard not to wish she was still drunk.

Because however hard it was to not look at Oliver when she was drunk is ten times harder now that she’s sober and doesn’t have a foggy haze of alcohol to muddle the space between them.

She also kind of wants to look at him because now it really seems like they’re the only ones out of their friends who haven’t done anything remotely close to settling down.

Diggle and Lyla have Sara, but Felicity had just written that off because they’re a little older than the rest of them and had already been married and divorced to each other one time around, so they deserved something settled down and quiet and happy.

And she’d ignored the whole situation with Barry and Iris because them moving in together (although not being together) was just a logical next step since they’d already lived together as kids.

But then Caitlin and Ronnie had gotten engaged.

And Sara and Nyssa had started talking about adopting.

And now this.

Somehow she’s on the same level of running away from commitment as party boy Oliver Queen is. So maybe, if she looks up a little at him when Laurel and Tommy announce their impending conversion to suburbia it’s not because she kissed him last night or anything like that, because, for once, they have something in common other than their friends.

They’re a lot more alike than she’d like to admit.

Oliver looks back at her. He’s not upset, as far as she can tell. Their announcement seems to have shocked him as well. He’s stabbing his omelette a little more firmly than one would probably suggest. And he’s got the look in his eyes that had driven her away from him in the first place - the one that makes it look like he’s about to bolt.

But he didn’t bolt last night, no, she was the one to do that.

She looks away.

Felicity wonders if all her friends got together and agreed to grow up and she wasn’t invited. Oliver wasn’t invited either, she guesses, but she would’ve thought someone would think she was ready for all that too.

She is ready, isn’t she?

Except she’s obviously not because if she was she wouldn’t have gone out last night and kissed the guy with “bad idea” stamped across his forehead.

The same guy who comes up to her when everyone else has scattered throughout the house and all Felicity’s trying to do is get some more juice.

The same guy who doesn’t talk about the kiss, or last night, or really anything, despite the fact that she’d read through all his texts before she’d come and that had been all he seemed willing to talk about last night. “When did all our friends start growing up?” he asks.

“I don’t know.” Felicity not-so-gently places the orange juice and the empty cup back on the counter and lets out a little bitter exasperated sigh. “But whenever it happened they sure as hell didn’t tell us.”

“Look, Felicity, about last night...”

“Can we just… not right now, okay? I'm feeling bad enough about my life choices as is.”

He somehow manages a smirk but she just sees her bitter smile reflected in his own. “Guess I'm not as good of a kisser as I'd thought then.”

“No it's not that, it's- the kiss was great. You're great. Amazing actually I think you made me forget my middle name for a second there. I mean there was still spit, but there's _always_ spit, you know, but your spit tastes extra nice so it wasn't that bad.  Still, like I said yesterday, bad idea.”

“Why? Because - what was it you said yesterday? - I've got commitment issues?”

She goes back to pouring her juice. “The size of Dig’s biceps.”

“I'm not the guy you think I am, you know. Just because neither of us got the memo to grow up, that doesn’t mean I’m not still _trying._ ”

“Oh really?” she asks, not looking away from her juice. “I’d really like to see you prove it.”

“Ten dates,” he promises, and yet again Felicity finds herself looking up from her juice.

“Excuse me?”

“Go on ten dates with me. Just ten. I promise no more kissing, since you hated that so much, and if you make it through that I promise you’ll never have to hide from Helena or Isabel when you see them in public again.”

She barely has time to think it over, but manages a smile anyways. “You forgot Carrie.”

“Carrie too. So, what do you say?”

“I’m thinking about it. What are you getting out of this whole arrangement?”

“Ten dates with you.”  
“I’m being serious.”

“I am too.”

She gives him a look.

“Well there _is_ the added benefit of us convincing our friends we’re mature enough to sit at the adults table and smoke pot.”

Felicity rolls her eyes. “Fine. Ten dates. No funny business, though. And we’re seeing Star Wars at least once.”

“Oh, and, one condition: you’re not allowed to fall in love with me.”

“Won’t be a problem,” she grumbles in response.

Felicity goes to reach for her juice, but Oliver swipes it from under her and brings it to her lips. He drinks the whole thing in one go and Felicity gulps.

Yep, not going to be a problem at all.


End file.
